


Make Lunch Not War

by Nagaina



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 14:41:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/762525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nagaina/pseuds/Nagaina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the debacle in Shattrath involving a trollish conman and some missing evidence, Jadaar escapes to Azeroth to lick his wounds and contemplate his failures after being drummed out of the only job he's ever wanted. Unfortunately, he doesn't run far enough to escape the author of all his woes.</p>
<p>This is a Work In Progress. I will be posting the complete version once it meets my standards for not sucking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Make Lunch Not War

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mareel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mareel/gifts).



Booty Bay had an atmosphere all its own -- one that was, unfortunately, compounded of a multitude of objectionable things, the vast majority of them hideously smelly. He found, after a few days, that he could live with much of it. Unwashed travelers were unwashed travelers everywhere, after all, and he eventually grew to find the scents of burning pitch and spilled alcohol almost soothing, and the salt-laden breeze gradually became quite bracing, especially first thing in the morning. There was, however, one thing that never lost its entire lack of charm: fish. The scales, the slime, the guts. The pervasive stink of piscene death got into everything and no amount of washing ever seemed to eradicate it entirely. His lack of tolerance was, he supposed, an inevitable product of growing up on a world where the oceans were smaller and saltier and much further between, and the largest bodies of water were fresh and swampy and the scents were wholly different, a somehow sweeter form of organic decay. He had become convinced in a matter of days that nothing would ever make dead fish smell sweet and the succeeding month had proved that initial impression correct.

****** **

The annoyance was increased, in large part, by the nature of his employment. He received, as part of his pay, room and board in the local flophouse -- he refused to dignify it with the term 'inn' -- and an irritatingly large proportion of that board consisted of...fish. Smoked fish. Salted fish. Fish swimming in pools of their own grease or puddles of some pleasantly spicy and flavorful sauce completely ruined by the presence of fish in it. Fish for dawnfry, fish for highsun, fish for nightmeal. Oh, certainly, he could spend his wages on food that _wasn't_ fish, but he would still have to smell everyone else's batter-dipped fried fish while he was eating, and so laying out for a properly-sized slab of salt-cured ham wasn't as satisfying as it should have been. And, in any case, his silver was better spent on the local top-shelf at the Salty Sailor, for common sailor's grog disagreed with him almost as much as the fish did.

****** **

In a way, he was grateful for the profusion of practical annoyances attending his current situation, for dealing with them -- and complaining extensively about them with his co-workers -- kept him from dwelling too deeply on the recent past, from sinking into a whiskey-pickled stew of bitterness and recrimination. The morons who insisted on getting into knife-fights on the rooftops, the thieves who weren't half as smart as they thought they were when it came to boosting Cartel property from the warehouses, the idiots who drank themselves into stupors and required fishing out of the Bay if they were lucky and scraping off the lower-level terraces if they weren't, the local children whose experiences with blue people did not extend to blue people with facial tendrils they kept wanting to touch or tails they wanted to pretend were riding lizards...These things were the weights he used to keep himself firmly anchored in the present. Granted, the children were by and large not so much an annoyance as rather cute, not at all unlike the children of his own people with their games and their yelling and their cheerful silliness. He had, on more than one occasion, let himself be dragged into their play and then gone on later to join their elders in the tavern, where the daily complaints flowed as freely as the ale but almost no one understood his preoccupation with fish.

****** **

"You're fightin' a losin' battle with that one, mon," Matlal, one of the troll leg-breakers he worked with on occasion, opined one night over a table littered with tankards and the remnants of a very eel-filled dinner. "There's not a town on the sea where there's no fish or fishing. Resign yourself and learn to love the snappah. Or go fifty miles inland."

****** **

Fifty miles inland was, point in fact, precisely where he had absolutely no desire to go and so he had grunted monosylibically in response and turned back to his properly-sized tankard of spiced ale. Fifty miles inland and one was deep inside the territories claimed by the Alliance, with whom his people had thrown in their lot, and the odds of meeting another of his own kind grew exponentially higher -- as did the risk of meeting someone who knew him personally, another possibility he aggressively had no desire to face. He had, in fact, chosen Booty Bay to go to ground in specifically _because_ its piratical ruler inclined neither to the service of the Horde nor to the aid of the Alliance, as well as its relatively remote location along the Stranglethorn coast. Only a comparative handful of travelers who could be said to be 'of the Alliance' ever came there, and usually for specific purposes: the fencing or purchase of items whose previous owners likely had not parted with them voluntarily and the legally-oriented pursuit of the same, the fishing tournaments that the city sponsored to 'increase tourism and showcase the beauty of our fair little town,' seeking medical attention after being introduced to the warrior traditions of the Gurubashi Arena floor. He had, blessedly, not met another of his own kind since his arrival, still shrouded in a cloud of personal failure and dishonor, to take up residence among the scum and villains and wretched ne'er-do-wells that called Booty Bay their home.

****** **

Laying in his troll-sized pallet that night, too weary to sleep and too drunken to escape the trap of maudlin self-castigation, he found he could admit to himself that, one day, he would have to go back among his people and accept the consequences of his actions, his failures. He had slunk out of Shattrath, burning with shame, without even writing his mother, or speaking to either of his sisters, unable to face their disappointment. He had left his uniform and taken his father's armor and sword, and gone through the first portal away from Draenor that he could find, and had washed up eventually in this place, where he could earn his keep in a manner that vaguely resembled his favored profession, his lifelong calling as a peacekeeper. Sometimes very vaguely. It was not, even in the most charitable estimation of possibilities, the sort of position that would lead to a heroic return to the good graces of his people, to the redemption of his failures, to the reclamation of his personal honor. In his most serene and alchohol-enabled moments of brutal honesty, he could admit to himself that remaining where he was would certainly put silver in his pocket and a roof over his head and a foul-smelling meal on his plate and would never force him to face himself, but it would also never do anything to help him move forward, either. He was not entirely certain that anything he could meet in this strange, benighted world would.

****** **

♦

****** **

It was, it seemed, going to be a case of always the last place he thought to look.

****** **

Booty Bay wasn't _quite_ the armpit of Azeroth -- that distinction continued to belong to Stonard, a place so entirely lacking in charm that he was convinced the Horde only held onto it for sentimental reasons, the main excuses to go there being the roads leading out of it. It was simply that, as far as he knew, Booty Bay was practically the only place in the world run _by_ criminals _for_ criminals, where for every one person conducting honest business on its piers and in its shops, there were six whose activities were well on the questionable side of legality, and two dozen who'd been up to things in that last month that would have them swinging at the crossroads gallows of every major principality both East and West were they caught. Its ruler was a goblin pirate infamous in every port in both Azeroth and Kalimdor, only barely retired from the life of active plunder, and a fleet of buccaneers, corsairs, privateers, and the odd legitimate trading vessel answered his every whim. At one point, he knew for certain, Alliance Intelligence had believed at least half the stolen goods in the world were passing into, out of, or otherwise through the city on the way to their final destinations and persistent rumor within the agency insisted that the lost crown jewels of Stormwind were sitting in the vault of Stranglethorn Trust Bank, awaiting just the right moment to be ransomed back for an utterly ridiculous sum of gold.

****** **

It was, in short, the very last place in the world one would expect to find an arrow-straight, morally upright, completely incorruptible former peacekeeper doing anything at all, much less working as hired muscle for the aforementioned barely retired pirate-baron. The very thought was utterly ridiculous. Preposterous beyond invention. No one would believe it in a novel. Which was, in fact, why he had initially failed to look there. A deficiency of imagination on his part, he supposed, one that had led him to squeeze himself through the gratings that guarded the canal outflows in Stormwind, belly-crawl through the tram-line that linked Stormwind and Ironforge, swim into the sea-flushed sewers of Theramore at high tide, and seriously consider the logistics of climbing up the side of Teldrassil before he had even _thought_ of traversing Stranglethorn's green and troll-ridden hills and just riding through the damned front gate of the notorious pirate-haven. He had been shot at by Sentinels, nearly beheaded by surly, humorless dwarves, had both his honor and his parentage insulted by humans in silly helmets, he had a collection of scrapes, bruises, and new scars to show for his efforts. He had, in fact, been sitting at the bar in Ratchet, contemplating how best to go about getting his hands on a Shattered Sun Offensive uniform and courier's case and whether to risk Auberdine's charming shores again or just filch a wyvern from the Horde outpost down the coast when, apropos of no labor or puissance on his part, the answer to all his questions came through the door in the form of two off-duty Cartel leg-breakers who gossiped, at drunken length, about their co-workers. Particularly the newest: a blue giant. A blue one-eyed giant. A blue one-eyed giant with a tail. _A blue one-eyed giant with a tail who complained about everything_.

****** **

It was all he could do not to purchase immediate passage on the boat that regularly plied the sea-lane between Ratchet and Booty Bay. Instead, he had paid an exorbitant bribe to a jobbing mage passing through the inn for a portal to Shattrath, robbed the Shattered Sun's launderer, made a brief report of his activities thus far to his current employer, and made absolutely certain there were no constantly disgruntled one-eyed giants sulking on Azuremyst Isle. The uniform and courier's satchel, at least, allowed him to add no more damage to his hide though his ultimate departure had been rather hurried, given that the courier he was impersonating arrived in a state of high dudgeon toward the end of the visit, and rather wet, given that his borrowed mount had bucked him off halfway between Azuremyst and Zoram Strand, necessitating quite a bit of survival swimming, a skill he hadn't seriously practiced in years. He supposed, as he lay exhausted and waterlogged on the beach afterwards, that he was going to owe his erstwhile former partner a certain amount of thanks for forcing him to use all the guile, skill, and resources at his disposal on this mission, and also a bill for expenses incurred during the course. Then he got up and ran from the naga.

****** **

The sadly depleted state of his operational funds made a number of decisions for him once he made it back to Orgrimmar; having dodged and occasionally failed to dodge peevish Kaldorei patrols with unfortunately well-detailed descriptions of him and irritated Horde patrols wanting to have sharp words with him regarding a certain well-bred wyvern all the way across the continent, the cost of his subsequent repair and resupply was a crime against budgetary restraint. Fortunately, the goblin-operated zeppelin line was free. Unfortunately, the fees that the little bastards charged to rent a proper mount on the other end, in Stranglethorn, were highway robbery at its finest, given that attempting to cross the jungle on foot was an exotic way to dine with tigers, lizards, and, if one was extremely unfortunate, trolls. All of which ultimately found him, some days later, sitting on the rocky beach along Blackwater Cove, wearing a hat hastily woven together of green palm-fronds to keep the sultry southern sun from cooking all of him well-done while he fished for his supper and his profit and kept an eye on the city docks, watching for a tell-tale flash of blue with a tail.

****** **

_Jadaar_ , Asric thought with what he felt was extreme serenity given the sunburnt state of his ear-tips, _you had best be here -- your mother is NOT paying me enough to sneak into Gnomeregan._

****** **

♦

****** **

"Yo! Tusks! One-Eye!"

****** **

The head of Baron Revilgaz' peacekeepers never, to Jadaar's knowledge, called anyone by their actual name. It was always 'Tusks' or 'Points' or, in the not infrequent case of a common identifying physical deformity, 'One-Eye' or 'Half-Hand' or what have you. If there were more than one person in a group with the common deformity it would become 'One-Eye with the limp' or, in his own case, 'One-Eye with the tail.' Women, excepting only tourist women, were 'Honeycakes' or 'Sugar-tart' or some other name that suggested the direction of his desires with regard to their persons as well as the size of his sweet-tooth. He was never entirely certain how much of this was an act put on for the sake of making local color as colorful as possible and how much was genuine perversity but he did know one thing -- when the Baron's chief of security deigned to address you, you dropped what you were doing and attended him. In this case, he and Matlal lowered the net-encased load they'd been helping to hoist back to the pier and turned at once to face him where he stood atop a piling, putting him almost at chest-height to both of them.

****** **

"The _Steamwheedle's Pride_ is due in on the night-tide," The goblin informed them without preamble. "The Baron wants you two on the dockside security detail. Be at the Salty Sailor no later than five bells."

****** **

After he had gone, and the cargo they'd been working on was safely loaded and stowed, Jadaar caught Matlal's eye. "The _Steamwheedle's Pride_ is a privateer vessel, is it not?"

****** **

"Yah, that she is." The troll tossed him a water skin and one of the apples from the lunch basket they'd brought to the docks with them. "Been to sea for less than a moon -- they must have taken a rich prize, or much damage, to be coming in so soon."

****** **

"Mmm." Jadaar drank the water and ate the apple and the blessedly eel-free meat pie that Calixte, Matlal's widowed witch-woman sister, had made for them, watching the activity of the harbor from where they sat in the shade of a half-dozen net-hung cargo lifts waiting to deposit their burdens.

****** **

In truth, not just the port but the whole of the city was abustle with activity. The Baron's current passion for padding his retirement vault with the proceeds of legitimate commerce was beginning to bear fruit in several ways simultaneously. The city was hosting the largest of its planned fishing tournaments in the next week and sportsmen from every kingdom in the east had converged on the place; earlier, the "ferry" that plied the sea-lane between Booty Bay and Ratchet, in Kalimdor, had arrived and disgorged a similarly-sized contingent from the western lands. Tensions were high and tempers were sharp, despite the stultifying, almost soporific midsummer heat, and he had come to the inescapable conclusion that drunken fishermen were the most violent people in the world with or without noticeable provocation; he suspected he'd always have the gnomish tooth-scars on his kneecaps. The local fisherfolk were making a killing taking boatloads of tourists out for specialty deep-sea fishing excursions and then soaking them for drinks and food; the marketplace was likewise flush with profit from selling cuts of rarer fish for twice the usual going rate along with a sudden influx of disembodied naga bits and their associated strange artifacts. The entire Blackwater pirate fleet, those that remained after the fleet's difficulties in the north and those that had been seized or built to replace the losses, had put to sea and the docking slips usually occupied by heavily armed brigantines were now full of fat-bellied trading vessels laden with the produce of Stranglethorn's summer harvest, the fruits and vegetables, spices and exotic hardwoods, and, yes, the damned salted and pickled fish, that could only be found in the far southern jungles and waters. In a few days the trade fleet would depart as well on the beginning leg of a long circuit that took them to every port on the western coast of Azeroth-Lordaeron and thence across the sea to the rich trading grounds of Kalimdor's coastal cities, returning from Port Steamwheedle six months hence to repeat the process with Stranglethorn's winter harvest.

****** **

As a consequence of all this, Booty Bay's resident population had more than tripled and most of the temporary residents spent their time blowing their pay on rum and whores, realizing the precise extent of their resulting poverty, and attempting to ameliorate it, usually through petty theft. A dozen would-be pickpockets were cooling their heels in the Baron's preferred method of public disciplinary action, wooden cages lining the road into town with signs describing the deeds of those incarcerated within and encouraging small children to throw rotten fruit and rocks. More serious crimes were dealt with in a far less humorous fashion or pre-empted as best they could be by the Baron's concealed eyes and ears and hands among the citizenry. The more he thought about it, the clearer it became that the unexpected return of the Steamwheedle's Pride was no doubt a matter of concern for precisely that reason -- a rich prize taken, the extra security brought on to discourage any larcenous thoughts on the part of the city's many temporarily impoverished visitors.

****** **

"It's going to be a long evening," Matlal agreed heavily. "I'm sorry, mon. Calixte wanted me to invite you to dinner but now we're both going to be out until every scrap of copper in her hold is accounted for somewhere."

****** **

"I sometimes get the feeling that your sister wants to fatten me up for something."

****** **

"She is. She likes her men...big. Not that you aren't big, mon, but when I say big I mean..." The troll held his arms their full, impressive span apart. " _Big._ "

****** **

"...Ah. And you don't...object to this scheme of hers?" Jadaar looked down at his half-eaten meat pie and began to feel a bit alarmed; Calixte was not precisely unknown for her expertise in potion-brewing and he couldn't help but wonder if her skills extended to love potions.

****** **

"Mon, you're blue enough for me." Matlal's grin showed every sharp tooth in his mouth.

****** **

_I need to get out of this city_ , Jadaar decided, and finished his lunch.

**********  
  
**

♦

****** **

The Blackwater Raiders of Booty Bay and the Bloodsail Buccaneers of Plunder Isle, being two competing bands of murderous cutthroats and thoroughly amoral plunderers, did not get on well at all, despite any and all allegations concerning honor among thieves or deeply cherished codes of appropriate piratical behavior. Rumor had it that the matter was a personal one, stemming from the death of "Commodore" Jessi Falrevere, the son of the Bloodsails' self-proclaimed admiral-commander, at the hands of the Blackwater reavers, it generally being construed as ungentlemanly for one pirate to murder another. Other rumors suggested this was simply a convenient pretext and that no love was lost between Falrevere the Elder and his predeceased offspring, the Bloodsails' admiral pursuing an implacably hostile course against his main rivals for reasons of personal enrichment and aggrandizement, underscored by attitudes best not thought on by decent-minded individuals. Asric was personally of the opinion that, since both sides of the quarrel amounted untrustworthy curs who'd cut your throat as soon as look at you and rob your corpse, that who wanted to kill whom and for what reasons didn't matter so much as the fact that they were conducting their moronic quarrel in the strangest places in the Cape of Stranglethorn and were prone to behaving as though anyone strolling into one of their camps, wholly unknowing of that camp's origins, was a spy. Under normal circumstances, he might have regarded this as extraordinary perspicacity on the part of people who probably couldn't even write their own names if you put a gun to their heads and demanded it on pain of death. As matters currently stood, however, it was both a damnable annoyance and an impediment to his plans, as he hadn't wanted to fight or die but merely sell some rather inedibly oily fish in a market not already oversaturated with the same.

****** **

"Spy!" Shouted the first one to see him.

****** **

"Elf!" Shouted the second, from the tone considering that observation to be the far more grievously offensive detail.

****** **

"Wait!" Asric interjected personally but, of course, they did not wait. Fortunately, there were only five of them. Also fortunately, he had prepared his weapons ahead of time -- he was expecting to slink into a hive pirates in the relatively near future, after all -- and ten minutes of irritatingly sweaty work later, he found himself standing alone in the midst of the camp, shaking his head sadly over five twitching bodies as the paralytic toxins he'd coated his knives with took optimal effect. "This was completely unnecessary, you know. All I wanted to do was sell you some oily blackmouths."

****** **

No one responded, of course -- either rendered senseless from the sudden, rapid constriction of the tiny muscles governing their breathing or otherwise totally immobilized beyond the ability to produce even a token bit of invective. Counting quietly under his breath -- optimal effect only lasted two minutes, after all -- he swiftly went about his business collecting a few useful odds and ends, and then departed, leaving the stringer of fish behind as repayment of a sort. Twenty minutes later, sitting in the crown of an enormous Stranglethorn palm thirty feet above the jungle floor perusing the contents of the satchel he had used to transport his acquisitions, he was beginning to wonder if he shouldn't have waited for one of them to regain consciousness after all. Most pirates, to his knowledge, didn't read very much at all, much less carry about correspondence encrypted in pre-Third War Alliance communications ciphers. Granted, it was the simplest of the old ciphers and, once decoded, yielded a string of numbers and letters that he suspected were navigation markers, which made a certain amount of sense -- the Bloodsails had to coordinate their land-based operations somehow, and their self-proclaimed admiral had, at one point, been an actual Alliance official of high rank on Kul Tiras. A single literate pirate and an old cipher no one used any longer served the need nicely but something about it nonetheless put the hairs on the back of his neck up.

****** **

Down below, the freshly-recovered pirates were staggering about in a perfect panic, inciting the local wildlife to murderous rage, and so he kept to the canopy as he made his way back toward the shore. Hauling his pack up to the comfort of his higher vantage point, he extracted the spyglass he had acquired during his visit to the Bloodsails' camp from its case. Booty Bay leapt into focus out of the midday haze, its jauntily red-painted walkways and piers aswarm, making looking for one tall, blue body among the multitude only slightly less difficult. Why did the Kaldorei have to be so damned big, anyway? And trolls ought to be green. And --

****** **

There he was. Asric pulled the glass away from his eye, blinked rapidly for several seconds, and then looked back again to make certain he wasn't hallucinating from a combination of ardent desire and sunstroke. No, it was most definitely Jadaar -- he was, in fact, the only draenei out on the piers actually working on something, as opposed to taking their leisure in the shade of the city's inner walkways. He had shed himself of the heaviest bits of his armor in favor of a shirt that bared the slate-blue skin of his arms and a baldric of light chain that fell almost to his knees, a wise choice given the heat and his place working a few feet from the deep, fairly nasty waters of the harbor. At the moment, he was helping an impressively buxom troll woman up the last rungs of the pier ladder while a second, equally large male troll hauled a net squirmingly full of eels out of her small boat. Jadaar and the woman stood for a time talking together while the male fetched a wheelbarrow to help carry her catch and he could not help but notice that the woman seemed unable to resist running a hand over Jadaar's chest or down his arm while they did so and that Jadaar was having quite a difficult time not looking frankly alarmed by it. He could sympathize -- trolls, in his experience, had difficulty taking 'no' for an answer. Well, somewhat. He also had to resist the urge to laugh himself out of his tree.

****** **

In any case, the chase was closing in on its end -- his quarry was found, in quite literally the last place he would have thought to look, and now all that remained was to actually catch him.

****** **

♦

****** **

In Jadaar's experience, by the time five bells rolled around most of the city's temporary residents were either in their cups or irrevocably on the way to being there, drinking deep from the Salty Sailor's exceedingly alcoholic well after a long day of strenuously pursued leisure. As a matter of customer appreciation, the tavern's assortment of bouncers kept all known cutpurses and pickpockets exiled to the boardwalk outside but permitted the resident card-sharps and dice-loaders to run a more or less permanent and constantly revolving gambling den at the back tables that raked in almost as much gold as the bar itself. By six bells, those not too drunken to stand were usually contemplating their companionship for the night, provided that they hadn't brought any with them, and being gently directed away from the serving wenches, frequently by the dulcet tones, punches, kicks, and tankards to the skull delivered by said wenches. The Salty Sailor had no staff professionally inclined to the possession of negotiable virtue and a standing agreement with the local whorehouse, which provided companionship in several genders and a truly astonishing profusion of species upon request. Public displays of the more exotic forms of physical recreation were generally frowned upon -- and were, in fact, subject for expulsion from the premises -- but the Sailor had more than enough dark corners that an amorously inclined couple could satisfy themselves and then go immediately back to whatever thoroughly immoral pursuits the advent of fleshly lust had disrupted. Technically speaking, the tavern actually closed at cock-crow, thought it usually disgorged/reabsorbed a steady stream of drunken, rowdy patrons from open to close, keeping the city's night-watch continuously busy with their antics.

****** **

It was therefore a matter of considerable grievance when five bells rolled around the usual suspects found the doors of the Salty Sailor temporarily barred to them, as much of the lower floor taproom was already full. Jadaar was personally rather surprised -- half the dubiously employed toughs, ruffians, and roustabouts that called the docks their home were crammed cheek-to-jowl with the entire complement of security personnel in the employ of the Steamwheedle Cartel, along with a double-handful handful of travel-weathered but substantially less scruffy sorts, mercenary-adventurers from both the north and west rather than locals. All told, there were the best part of a hundred, sitting in the late afternoon swelter with the downstairs shutters closed and being denied anything stronger than the weakest watered ale and freshly baked bar pretzels. Given the heat, the grumbling and the glares among the decidedly mixed-species, heavily-armed crowd, Jadaar was quite grateful that Baron Revilgaz wasted no time once the assemblage was complete, descending from his perch atop the Sailor to address the throng before a riot could break out.

****** **

"Gentlebeings!" The Baron's surprisingly deep voice cut through the low rumble of discontent beginning to build in the room and silenced even the most determined chatterers. “Thank you for your prompt attendance and response to my little invitation. In the interest of making this meeting as quick and painless as possible, I just want to say: they’re right. All of those rumors you’ve heard over the last day or so? Absolutely correct. The _Steamwheedle’s Pride_ will be arriving this evening with a prize vessel in tow.” A low murmur ran through the crowd at that. “I called you here today to make an offer. Many of you have worked for me in the past, in one capacity or another, and so I wanted to offer you rights of first refusal. When the ships arrive, we will require...extra security -- considerable quantities of extra security, while the vessels are being unloaded and their cargoes deposited for safekeeping, and also maintain the security in our rather unfortunately over-full little town. Additionally, we will require a more...significant...security presence at our storage facilities while the cargo is being  inventoried. I anticipate the entire operation will require a minimum of two days to complete to my satisfaction.” Revilgaz smiled a rather toothy smile. “Two days, for which I am willing to offer a select group of individuals a one percent cut of all profits plus triple my usual security going rates.”

****** **

That sent a significantly louder murmur around the room and Jadaar glanced a question at Matlal. Triple the going rate represented an extremely generous offer all by itself, he knew, enough to make even his fingers itch at the thought of it.

****** **

“One percent o’ spoils -- dat is not’ing to sneeze at, mon.” The troll shook his head. “Dis must have been a big prize. Some fat merchantman heavy wit’ goods.”

****** **

Jadaar chewed his lip, deeply and genuinely torn. Booty Bay and the Blackwater Raiders held privateer commissions -- legitimately acquired commissions -- from both the Horde and the Alliance that, in theory, allowed them to harass merchant shipping more or less at will, making the seizure of civilian trade vessels an amoral but not precisely illegal part of the company’s standard business practices. The fact that they were playing both sides for their own profit was morally questionable, at best. He felt, deep in the parts of his soul that embraced the primacy of law and order as guiding principles, that he should refuse the offer on the grounds that failing to do so would constitute a willingness to tolerate theft as a legitimate means of personal profit and go back to his lower-paying but at least ethically sound position as a dock worker.

****** **

On the other hand, the triple rate alone would be enough money to escape this fish-stinking pit and set himself up comfortably nearly anywhere else. Before Calixte successfully hexed him into a web of romance from which honor would not permit him to escape.

Slowly, Jadaar raised his hand.

 


End file.
